Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle-Eastern Languages, San Diego State University, United States; Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.
Cognition. 2020 Jan;194:104023. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104023. Epub 2019 Aug 21.
Our research addresses the important question whether language influences cognition by studying crosslinguistic differences in nonlinguistic visual search tasks. We investigated whether capture of visual attention is mediated by characteristics corresponding to concepts that are differently expressed across different languages. Korean grammatically distinguishes between tight- (kkita) and loose-fit (nehta) containment whereas German collapses them into a single semantic category (in). Although linguistic processing was neither instructed nor necessary to perform the visual search task, we found that Korean speakers showed attention capture by non-instructed but target-coincident (Experiment 1) or distractor-coincident (Experiments 4 and 5) spatial fitness of the stimuli, whereas German speakers were not sensitive to it. As the tight- versus loose-fit distinction is grammaticalized only in the Korean but not the German language, our results demonstrate that language influences which visual features capture attention even in non-linguistic tasks that do not require paying attention to these features. In separate control experiments (Experiments 2 and 3), we ruled out cultural or general cognitive group differences between Korean and German speaking participants as alternative explanations. We outline the mechanisms underlying these crosslinguistic differences in nonlinguistic visual search behaviors. This is the first study showing that linguistic spatial relational concepts held in long-term memory can affect attention capture in visual search tasks.
我们的研究通过研究非语言视觉搜索任务中的跨语言差异，解决了语言是否通过影响认知的重要问题。我们调查了视觉注意力的捕获是否通过与不同语言中不同表达的概念相对应的特征来介导。韩语在语法上区分紧密（kkita）和宽松（nehta）的包容关系，而德语则将它们合并为一个单一的语义类别（in）。尽管在进行视觉搜索任务时既没有指示也不需要进行语言处理，但我们发现，韩语使用者表现出对非指令但与目标一致（实验 1）或与分心物一致（实验 4 和 5）的刺激的空间适应性的注意力捕获，而德语使用者对此则不敏感。由于只有在韩语中而不是在德语中语法化了紧密-宽松区分，我们的结果表明，语言甚至在不需要注意这些特征的非语言任务中影响了哪些视觉特征可以捕获注意力。在单独的控制实验（实验 2 和 3）中，我们排除了韩语和德语使用者之间的文化或一般认知群体差异作为替代解释。我们概述了这些非语言视觉搜索行为中的跨语言差异的潜在机制。这是第一项表明长期记忆中的语言空间关系概念可以影响视觉搜索任务中注意力捕获的研究。
